Читать книгу A Popular Handbook to the National Gallery, Volume I, Foreign Schools - National Gallery (Great Britain) - Страница 58
NUMERICAL CATALOGUE, WITH BIOGRAPHICAL AND DESCRIPTIVE NOTES
40. LANDSCAPE: PHOCION
ОглавлениеNicolas Poussin (French: 1593-1665). See 39.
"The work of a really great and intellectual mind, one of the finest landscapes that ancient art has produced"75 (Modern Painters, vol. i. pt. ii. sec. ii. ch. i. § 8), – its excellence consisting in the perfect harmony of the landscape with the subject represented, and thus marking the painter's sense of the dependence of landscape for its greatest impressiveness on human interest. In the foreground to the left is Phocion "the good" – the incorruptible Athenian general and statesman, contemporary with Philip and Alexander the Great, of whom it is recorded that he was "never elated in prosperity nor dejected in adversity," and "never betrayed pusillanimity by a tear nor joy by a smile." He wears an undyed robe, and is washing his feet at a public fountain, the dress and action being thus alike emblematic of the purity and simplicity of his life. In entire keeping with this figure of noble simplicity is the feeling of the landscape in which "all the air a solemn stillness holds." In detail, however, Ruskin finds the picture deficient in truth – false, indeed, both in tone and colour (see ibid., vol. i. pt. ii. sec. ii. ch. ii. § 5).
75
Constable, who made some studies from this picture, was of the same opinion. In a letter to Fisher he describes it as "a noble Poussin: a solemn, deep, still summer's noon, with large umbrageous trees, and a man washing his feet at a fountain near them. Through the breaks in the trees are mountains, and the clouds collecting about them with the most enchanting effects possible. It cannot be too much to say that this landscape is full of religious and moral feeling" (Leslie's Life of Constable, p. 90).
